Clarity, not simplicity

How brands can benefit from writing that reflects the language of their audience.

Copywriters of the world, are we doing it all wrong? Just maybe. When it comes to bringing a
brand’s tone of voice to life it seems that less isn’t necessarily more. In fact it’s the little extras
that make all the difference.

You don’t have to go far in the world of branding, advertising and design to hear a clamour of
voices expounding the power of simplicity. The Modernist assertion that less is more has
become an article of faith amongst creatives everywhere, but is this always right? My view is
that while simplicity is good, clarity is far, far better. The information expert Richard Saul
Wurman makes the point that while clarity is an essential prerequisite for understanding,
simplicity often means taking away the very bits that made the message interesting in the first
place. The line between simplicity and simplistic is precariously fine; crossing it can have
disastrous consequences for understanding. So the question arises: can a focus on clarity
rather than simplicity help brands communicate more effectively? Can it act as a practical
guide to producing better work?

In my own area of copywriting, the answer is a definite “yes”. There are some notable brands
that don’t insist on talking down to their audience and aren’t afraid to use a few extra words to
create the right atmosphere. The result is a truly distinctive tone of voice. In the UK, brands
like Innocent, Orange, Ikea and Egg come into this category. These remarkable identities are
examples of what I term minimal brands, super-confident corporate identities that make their
own rules. They have clarity of purpose (in terms of what they are about and why they exist)
and clarity of expression (in terms of how they present themselves to the world). In fact they
are minimal precisely because of their clarity – it’s their distinguishing quality.

So while the pursuit of clarity may deliver simplicity as a by-product, it isn’t always the case –
it all depends on a brand’s audience and context. As a copywriter I’m constantly torn between
the (perfectly laudable) desire to simplify, and an awareness of the complexity with which my
audience actually talks. By substituting clarity for simplicity the problem dissolves. Technical
or specialist language is crucial when talking to groups for whom this language is their
everyday shorthand. Specialist vocabularies arise out of the need to increase the granularity
of standard-issue language in response to very specific communication conditions. The point
is that the language used to address a particular audience must be appropriate to that
audience. This is the most important idea in this article – speak the language of your
audience or be dammed. It’s amazing how frequently this is forgotten.

Paradoxically, an emphasis on clarity may mean leaving some aspects of your message open
to interpretation, ready to be completed in the mind of your reader. A clear but open-ended
message can sometimes make a lot more sense than either a simpler version that leaves out
essential details, or a lengthy explanation that tries to nail down every semantic loose end,
boring its audience to death along the way. If the message is right for the audience, and the
audience is right for the message, they’ll get it - simple as that. It’s a powerful realisation, but
like many such realisations, frequently forgotten. Exactly what “Just Do It” has to do with
sports apparel isn’t too clear, but it works. Put the right cues in front of the right audience and
the magic will just happen. Meaning will somehow detonate in their minds.

In fact, in some situations the pursuit of simplicity can work against effective communication.
The more you cut, the less you can say. It’s the stuff that surrounds the core of a message
that constitutes its tone of voice. This is often where the real communication takes place – the
communication not of facts and figures, but of emotions. As the writer and tone of voice
expert John Simmons has pointed out, Winston Churchill could have expressed “I have
nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” as a bulleted list along the lines of “My offer:
blood, toil, tears, sweat”. This would have ruined the emotional impact of his message – the
longer, less direct form has infinitely more power.

As usual, it helps to compare brands to people. Think of an individual with a characteristic

tone of voice – that tone of voice is made up of their choice of words, their phrasing, their use
of punctuation, idioms, figures of speech, rhetorical flourishes and so on – all the things that
are, strictly speaking, unnecessary for communication to take place. What they say (their core
message) and how they choose to say it (their tone of voice) are two different things. The
more a writer simplifies a text by cutting away anything that is surplus to the requirements of
basic intelligibility, the more she reduces the possibility of creating an original tone of voice,
simply because there are fewer words to play with. The result is not so much a loss of
meaning, but rather of emotion. In the area of branding copywriting at least, it seems that just
occasionally there are times when less is not necessarily more.

© Roger Horberry 2003

Roger Horberry (rogerhorberry@hotmail.com) is a senior writer at Elmwood Design.